{"product_id":"marina-city-parking-garage","title":"Marina City Parking Garage","description":"\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eADDRESS: 300 North State Street, Chicago, IL\u003cbr\u003eARCHITECT: Bertrand Goldberg\u003cbr\u003eYEARS BUILT: 1964–1968\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Oh, that parking garage in Chicago! Steve McQueen! What was that movie? He drove all around and then jumped in his car into the river!\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI have been showing my print of Marina City at art festivals for many years now. And these are the words that most people utter when they see this image. Every single time. The same words. The same excitement. The same confident misremembering.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI used to be surprised. I am not anymore.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere is the truth: most people have never actually seen the movie “The Hunter.” They have a memory of a feeling. They remember the thrill of a car chase up a spiral ramp. They remember flight, and speed, and the green water of the Chicago River rushing up from nineteen floors below. What they do not remember is who was in the car.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was not Steve McQueen.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is how legends are made. Not from facts. From feelings that needed somewhere to live.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStand on the State Street bridge, and you’ll find the twin towers of Marina City rising from the north bank of the Chicago River like two concrete corn cobs. Sixty-five stories each. Curved balconies stacked one on top of another, flaring outward in rhythmic semicircles. Above the river, above the traffic, above the noise of the Loop, they look like something from another century's dream of the future.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow look at the base. The bottom nineteen floors of each tower are completely open to the air. No walls. No glass. Just raw concrete rings, one stacked on another, each carrying a row of cars parked over the edge like metal teeth. Between the cars and the Chicago River: nothing. A few inches of concrete curb, and then open air, and then the water sixty feet below.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the parking garage. This is what people remember.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eArchitect Bertrand Goldberg completed Marina City in 1968. He was not building a garage. He was building an argument. The argument was this: Chicago was dying at its center. Middle-class residents were leaving for the suburbs. Downtown was emptying. The car had won. Goldberg's answer was to build a city within a city, a place where you could live, work, eat, drink, go to the theater, park your car, and dock your boat, all without ever crossing the river. Housing, offices, restaurants, a marina, all bundled into two towers on a single city block. He called it a solution to urban decay.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe parking garage was not an afterthought. It was the foundation, literally. The circular concrete core of each tower rises from bedrock, and the first nineteen floors wrap around it in a continuous spiral ramp. Cars drive up in an unbroken helix, like water climbing a corkscrew. 896 parking spaces per tower. The open-air design eliminated the need for mechanical ventilation. The circular structure distributes weight evenly through the reinforced concrete. Engineering and aesthetics were the same thing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost architects hide their parking. Goldberg put his on the outside and made you look at it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe result is a parking structure that reads like a fossil: the impression of a thousand cars, layer after layer, pressed into gray concrete. From the river walk below, the stacked rings resemble the petals of a concrete sunflower. Or the chambers of a nautilus. Or something that grew here, rather than something built here.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is also the matter of the valets. Residents do not park their own cars. Attendants handle the maneuvering, riding a small vertical manlift inside the garage core to move between floors rather than walking the long spiral ramps. The system has operated this way for sixty years. The garage is not just architecture. It is a choreography.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut let's roll back to the movie, which was called “The Hunter”. It was released in 1980. It was Steve McQueen's last film.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRoger Ebert called it \"one of those awful movies catering to a star's ego and image.\" He was not wrong. McQueen plays Ralph \"Papa\" Thorson, a professional bounty hunter sent to Chicago to apprehend a fugitive named Ritchie Blumenthal. Ritchie is played by Eli Wallach, an actor you probably remember as Tuco, the Ugly, from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” the one who got to live at the end because he knew where the gold was buried.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn “The Hunter”, Tuco does not get to live.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePapa Thorson chases Ritchie through Chicago. They end up at Marina City. Ritchie carjacks a brand-new 1980 Jasmine Green Pontiac Grand Prix. McQueen, because this is that kind of movie, commandeers a red tow truck. There is a car chase up the spiral ramp of the west tower. They wreck a magnificent number of other cars on the way up. When Ritchie reaches the top of the nineteenth floor, there is nowhere left to go. He turns around. Steve McQueen is below him in the tow truck, blocking the ramp. The only exit is the open edge.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd the car goes over.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn September 21, 1979, filmmakers staged the shot with a dummy behind the wheel of the Pontiac. Hundreds of spectators lined Wacker Drive and the riverbanks to watch. The car launched from the nineteenth floor, turned slowly in the air, and hit the Chicago River. The impact was so violent that the filmmakers reportedly changed the script. The character was originally supposed to survive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWatch the footage, and you understand why it became a legend. The green car soars out of the concrete structure, and for one long second, it hangs in the air above the river, nose tilting down, catching the light. Then it plunges. The splash is enormous. Then the river closes over it, and it is gone.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIcarus. Every time. We cannot stop watching Icarus fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeople remember Steve McQueen jumping. He did not jump. He watched someone else jump from the safety of a tow truck. The bad guy jumped. The villain jumped. The man who stole the car jumped. McQueen stayed on the ramp.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt does not matter. The legend does not care about these details.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat the legend remembers is the feeling: the spiral ramp, the speed, the open edge, and then nothing but air and river below. The freedom of it. The terror of it. The two are the same thing from that height.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBertrand Goldberg understood this. He built a parking garage with no walls because he wanted you to feel the city. He wanted you to see the river from every level. He wanted the car, the building, the water, and the sky to be one continuous experience. He did not want you to park in the dark. He built the most open parking garage in the history of American architecture, and then he put it at the base of two of the most recognizable towers in Chicago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA film crew saw what he built and immediately understood: this is a place where something can happen. A car can leave the ground here. The city is right there. The river is right there. There is no barrier between the machine and the void.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey were right. And the legend that grew from that one stunt has outlasted the film, outlasted the reviews, outlasted Roger Ebert's verdict on Steve McQueen's ego.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe parking garage became more famous than the movie. The movie became more famous than the facts. And the facts, as usual, are stranger and more interesting than anything the legend invented.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eStand on the State Street bridge. Look at the base of the west tower. Count the floors. Nineteen. Find the top level and trace the edge with your eye. That is where the car went over. That is where the river begins, sixty feet below, green and moving.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow look at the whole structure. Look at the stacked rings, the open bays, the raw concrete catching the afternoon light. This is what Goldberg built: a machine for living, a city compressed into two towers, a parking garage that refuses to be hidden. It is sixty years old, and it still looks like nothing else in the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe legend got the wrong man in the car. 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